What Is There to Say?

I think about writing a lot. I read my old posts, reflect upon all of the changes in outlook I’ve had since writing them. When I do think of something to say, I dump it into an all-too-often hastily written Facebook post, then I call it a day.

Facebook “markets” the content for me. They do their own maintenance. And the audience is essentially guaranteed: I know at least some portion of my few hundred Facebook friends will see what I write.

But here?

During the 2000s, I spent a lot of time blogging, but too much of that time was spent bike-shedding: I’d focus on what I thought were the easy details — tinkering with code, design elements, and features — rather than the weightier task of writing coherent content on a consistent basis.

Still, there was a point where this blog — this hodgepodge mess of discordant thoughts and no real identity — was earning me a small paycheck every couple of months or so from advertising. The blog was a member of at least one “best blogs” community, and according to Alexa traffic ratings, it was one of the top 100,000 most visited websites on the Internet.

I had an audience. But what did I have to say?

The vast majority of my traffic was coming in for a scant few posts. I published a checklist of diecast car toys from the first Cars movie, wrote about the Bible’s examples of positive non-monogamous marriage, dipped my toes into the “King James Version only” discussion, and wrote about my (probably now irrelevant) WordPress plugin. For a whole lot of users, the handful of posts on those few topics were a hot destination, with conversations running into the hundreds of comments.

None of those things are terribly relevant to me now. What is there to say?